In 2002, Tim Prosser’s single-wide trailer was raided by a Sainte Genevieve County, Missouri drug task force. Narcotics officers found a makeshift meth lab and drugs. Due to Prosser being a first-time non-violent offender, he wan’t looking at a hard time. Besides, he wasn’t a dealer. Just an addict.
But 13 months later, the drug task force raided him again. They found 350 grams of meth (most of it in liquid form), a new meth lab, and a 17-year-old girl in Prosser’s bed. With this second offense, before the first one had been adjudicated, Prosser ended up getting a life sentence for trafficking methamphetamine in the first degree. Missouri has a 90-gram statutory minimum for first-degree drug trafficking, which made Prosser ineligible for parole.
Fast forward to 2015. The prosecuting attorney for Ste. Genevieve, Carl Kinsky, who was in charge of Prosser’s case and orchestrated him getting a life sentence, wrote a letter to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon. “I am requesting the commutation of Timothy Prosser’s sentence in the above cause,” the letter said. “I was the prosecuting attorney who prosecuted Mr. Prosser and am the current prosecuting attorney for Ste. Genevieve County.”
In the letter, Kinsky wrote that Prosser would have gotten a more lenient sentence if he’d been convicted of murder in the first degree. Murderers can get life without parole too, but the language of the statute allows the jury to be informed that a life sentence means a life sentence—something that wasn’t applied to Prosser’s drug trafficking charge.
“I argued against the judge so informing the jury, but now find it unconscionable that a defendant in a murder trial has the benefit of a jury being so instructed, but not Timothy Prosser,” Kinsky wrote.
“In my opinion, Mr. Prosser was clearly guilty. His decision to proceed to trial was likely the result of poor judgment caused by his drug abuse. His conduct merited substantial punishment. Nevertheless, it did not merit this punishment and it did not merit this punishment from a jury that was not fully advised of the consequences of the sentence it assessed.”
Kinsky says that time has given him perspective, and that Prosser’s case has played on his mind for a while. The fifth-term prosecutor is not running for re-election in 2018 and, like President Obama, he is attempting to right some wrongs before he gets out of office by petitioning the governor to commute Prosser’s sentence and let him go home.
“Life without the possibility of parole means death in prison,” Kinsky told the Riverfront Times. “It means you’re leaving prison feet-first no matter what. If he lives to be 500 years old, he still dies in prison.”
The reality of Prosser’s arrest varies from the record also. The 350 grams of liquid the drug task force confiscated would only make about three to five grams of pure meth, said Prosser.
“That’s another bizarre aspect of the statute,” says Kinsky. “Ninety grams of pure meth is worth a lot. Ninety grams of a liquid that contains meth is, I don’t know what it could produce typically, but it’s not the final product. It’s not going to produce anywhere near 90 grams of pure meth.”
Patrick Prosser, Tim’s 80-year-old father, told the Riverfront Times, “He was the poster boy for meth, that’s what they made him. We want him out.”
It took some time—13 years—but finally, the man who prosecuted Prosser has figured out that the now 53-year-old wasn’t a drug kingpin, he wasn’t even a dealer. He was just an addict who made his own meth for personal use. And doing a life sentence for that is a grave injustice.
